Vintage Pic 16C73

[Ioannis]

You naughty Henrik!

Yeah, I started with a Pikstart+ and those widowed chips along with an UV lamp to erase them. 10-15 endless minutes until reprogramming! Yikes!

Ioannis

[Art]

Was the sat access control Irdeto 1? because I wrote PMK and signature decrypt for that on pic (in asm though).

[HenrikOlsson]

Honestly, I have NO idea. I knew nothing about how it worked (still don't really). I barely knew what a PIC was or how you actually wrote a program for it.
I had done a tiny bit of 8051 stuff in school but never quite grasped the whole programming mindset (still don't really...). All I did was etch some boards and programmed some PICs with .hex files (there was two 16C84 on each card) from the World Wide Web.

I remember that when they changed keys (or whatever) I got a bunch of cards back which needed new firmware loaded into them. It really didn't last long (might have done 15-20 cards tops) before it got to a point where they could change keys two or three times in a week and always right before a football game or in the middle of a movie "premiere" and everyone , including me and my "partner in crime" lost interest in it.

[Art]

We got a step ahead of that, and could process encrypted master key updates here... I kind of assume it’s the same system,
because it was used widely around the world. Australia, Germany, and Sth Africa I know for sure.

[HenrikOlsson]

Yes, later generation, more capable, cards updated automatically or perhaps the user could do it with the remote or something. But the ones we we etched at home and put C84's on was not that "advanced".
Like I said, at the time I had absolutely NO idea how the thing worked or what it ACTUALLY did (the card and PICs on it). And when it comes to crypto-stuff I'm still very much ignorant :-)

[Art]

Latest chips arrived

SP0256 variants. The first from General Instruments, and then after Microchip acquired them.
These are a speech synthesiser that appeared in some toys, and also in a PicBASIC project book I still have.